Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books

by Gary Giddins

Long recognized as America's most brilliant jazz writer, the winner of many major awards--including the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award--and author of a highly popular biography of Bing Crosby, Gary Giddins has also produced a wide range of stimulating and original cultural criticism in other fields. With Natural Selection , he brings together the best of these previously uncollected essays, including a few written expressly for this volume.
The range of topics is spellbinding. Writing with insight, humor, and a famously deft touch, he offers sharp-edged perspectives on such diverse subjects as Federico Fellini and Jean Renoir, Norman Mailer and Ralph Ellison, Marlon Brando and Groucho Marx, Duke Ellington and Bob Dylan, horror and noir, the cartoon version of Animal Farm and the comic book series Classics Illustrated . Giddins brings to criticism an uncommon ability, long demonstrated in his music writing, to address in very few words an entire career, so that we get an in-depth portrait of the artist beyond the film, book, or recording under review. For instance, Giddins offers a stunning reappraisal of Doris Day, who he terms "the coolest and sexiest female singer of slow ballads in film history." He argues eloquently for a reconsideration of the forgotten German-language novelist Soma Morgenstern. In a section on comedy, he offers fresh perspectives on the three great silent film stars--Chaplin, Keaton, and
Lloyd--while resurrecting the legendary Jack Benny and reevaluating the controversial Jerry Lewis. There's also a memorable look at Bing Crosby's film career (he calls Crosby's blockbuster Going My Way "a neglected masterpiece") and a close examination of Marcel Carne's beloved Children of Paradise . Of course, Giddins also supplies excellent commentary on major and underrated figures, and especially the uses of jazz in film.
A wonderful gathering of little-known treasures, Natural Selection will broaden the perception of Gary Giddins as one of our most important cultural critics.

Genres: Film, Music, Literary Criticism

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Kai Weber · Rating 2 out of 5]

The promo blurb on the front cover says: "Just try to read all of Natural Selection without buying at least a few CD's and DVD's, ..." Well, no problem. There's hardly any piece in this film, music and book review collection that could entice me to buy anything. The book is more about the author forging not-too-simple-sentences with exquisite adjectives than about the art pieces that are reviewed. That doesn't mean that some of the reviews are not informative, yet the majority is not so. Much of the film reviews are plot renarrations rounded off with some side-references. The music part at least made me re-listen to some Count Basie. My love for "Count Basie and the Kansas City 7" got re-ignited, yet that has nothing to do with Gary Giddins either, because that's not the album he writes about. Thanks for nothing, Mr. Giddins.

[Harley Lond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned too much from his criticism and reviews. This guy knows everything about everything.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as outrageous as, say, Pauline Kael, and not as snarky as, say, Anthony Lane or as loquacious as Greil Marcus or as rowdy as Lester Bangs, but Gary Giddins is still a critic that rocks.

A long time jazz writer who also writes often and well about film, books, and general culture, Giiddins has great taste and an informed, unpretentious, witty prose style. It brings out the value of people who made amazing art that might be overlooked these days- people like The Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Fritz Lang, John Cassavettes, Bresson, Clifford Brown, Albert Ayler, Duke Ellington, and many more.

I worry sometimes whether or not culture from before, say, the sixties gets sort of shunted to the side in terms of the public imagination. Mostly there's boomer nostalgia about hippie stuff or 70's era music. Don't get me wrong- I love that stuff as much as the next guy, but I think we already know how great it was.

What we need is to find the things that came generations before that and renew them. Charlie Parker is still cool. Jon Ford is still badass. Ralph Ellison should never be overlooked, even if people only know Invisible Man, great book that it is. Same goes for Jazz, of course- the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke and Bud Powell and Ornette and Coltrane and Miles and Basie and Sinatra and Sarah Vaughn and Billie Holiday is just as vital and irresistible as it ever was.

All we need is someone to help us figure it all out, explain it for us a little, and have the passion and the articulation to help make it new. Gary Giddins is one of those critics who helps to do just that.